Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Confessions!

I’m going to invite the people of the WriYe blogging circle to make a confession about their writing

Hmmm, confessions.... I'm not sure where to start. I could confess that I spend time at work jotting down ideas I've had for stories, but it's not especially scandalous, is it? After all, you're supposed to catch ideas on paper (or screen) when you get them, aren't you?

So my confession is - I often start a story with absolutely no idea where it's heading, but I always seem to know how long the finished story will be.

Last April I decided to write an April Fools novel and I picked something I'd never tried before - a romance. To make things slighty easier for myself I based it on a song, so I had certain lines of the song that I knew would relate to certain instances in the story. But aside from knowing I was going to write a story based on a song, I really had no idea what I was doing. I had no characters, no setting (except that it was going to be on a ship - the song - and the eventual finished story - was called Down With The Ship), and no real idea of a storyline.

But as I was thinking about the story and the ship, the two main characters started to create themselves in the situation. I wrote a couple of scenes which would take place between the two of them and as I did, the world they lived in started to take more shape. Then I could move on to scenes involving more people and more places.

Eventually I knew my characters and setting well enough that I could start to pull the scenes together into a more cohesive story, and eventually I did finish the story.

That's not quite typical for me - usually I start with a character in a situation rather than a song, but it's quite often how I end up piecing my stories together.